This One Is Mostly Calling Ed Piskor A Clown
Ed Piskor, the “master” “comic maker” who co-runs the Cartoonist Kayfabe channel on YouTube dot com, as well as the author of books like “The Hip-Hop Family Tree” and “X-Men: Grand Design”, is a fucking clown. Every day, after a hearty clown breakfast, he takes a long clown shower, and then he puts on his big boy clown shirt and clown pants, then his clown socks, then his clown shoes, before applying his clown makeup, putting on his clown nose and his clown wig, and then he goes to work, being a clown, at the circus.
Now, usually, this kind of clown bullshit is inoffensive. Two grown men in their late thirties gushing with original insights like “David Mazzucchelli is an incredible artist”, “Wow! Jack Kirby was really good!” or “Hey you should be reading Love and Rockets” is a mostly harmless form of self-gratification, more elaborate than jerking off or writing newsletters, but with no more of an impact on the world. If that’s what you do for fun, more power to you, but I don’t really have to care.
That was, until Ed Piskor posted this tweet on both his main account and that of his Youtube channel:
CartoonistKayfabe on Twitter: "The best X-Men comics to come out in 30 years is John Byrne’s new, unauthorized, bootleg comics that he’s making and giving away for free online! There are 18 issues so far and we happened upon hard copies of those comics for @CartoonKayfabe ! https://t.co/pMFsiCdSbJ https://t.co/L9mr48q6Wz" / Twitter
Even if you had the patience to watch the entire one hour and nine minutes of the video, why the fuck would you? This dumb motherfucker just said that John Byrne, John fucking Byrne, the textbook definition of “washed, past their prime stupid motherfuckers who have retreated into the echo chamber of their own ass so they could hear their shitty fucking opinions spoken back at them”, making the best X-Men comics to come out in the past 30 years? No. Fuck you.
Just fucking look at it! It looks like shit! It reads like shit! It’s by notorious fucking asshole John fucking Byrne! It’s shit, and the fact that you’re out there pretending it’s not is making me suspect there’s something sinister at play there, that I do not care for one single bit! When you go out there talking about creeps and cranks like Byrne and Liefeld and the stuff they did 40 years ago, like it’s as good as comics got, what’s your project, and why does it reek of the same appeals to nostalgia animating the violence of the fascist dipshits trying to ruin comics?
In truth, comics, as an artform and as a field of study, are getting better all the time. It’s been, it is, and it will be an inevitable fact. As we understand more and more of what can be done with the form, and as more and more people of more and more backgrounds get their perspectives and their voices heard, comics get better. If you’re going into this thinking that your favorite comic of all time has already come out, I cannot trust you. Simple as that.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: I AM ALSO SAYING THAT THIS NEWSLETTER IS BETTER THAN EVERY SINGLE ISSUE OF WIZARD MAGAZINE AND THE COMICS JOURNAL COMBINED. FIGHT ME.
On to this week’s business, which begins with a nice thick slice of Challenge. As the world’s foremost Tom King scholar and apologist, I am excited beyond belief to bring you full coverage of this past Tuesday’s double feature. It’s a fun one. It’s a complicated one. LET’S GO!
To the surprise of way too many people, but not me, Rorschach has been one of the most satisfying comics to read on an issue-by-issue basis this side of The Immortal Hulk. That’s because, in spite of its convoluted trappings as a conspiracy noir, each individual issue is very carefully constructed, so as to provide a story with a beginning, middle, and end, centered around one single character, and dealing with one single idea, going on to inform the greater puzzle but fully able to stand on its own.
By way of example, and to provide a summary of what we’re dealing with, let’s take a quick look back at the first three issues. #1 set up the mystery of an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate and Rorschach’s return, following the detective as he gathers the facts, and laying in the background its first few clues that the answer might have something to do with comic books. #2 looked into the would-be Rorschach, a comic book artist, through a tale of wish fulfillment turned deadly. #3 did the same for his would-be accomplice, looking at her origin story, and the compounding terrible effect a history of America misunderstanding its past disasters can have on someone.
Which, finally, takes us to Rorschach #4, where these ideas begin to come together in a familiar shape. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a circus strongman gets mistaken for a masked hero. Someone tells the story of that one guy who got thrown down an elevator shaft. A blue god extends their hand, and, in the snow, they destroy a body. Rorschach, on the trail of a villain, gets trapped by the police and thrown in jail. The elements are familiar, but they’re put together wrong. And as we get the past wrong, we see our frame of the world warp. Through his layouts, Jorge Fornes imposes his own sense of temporality to the events, until he doesn’t. Things begin falling into place, and, once more, we return to a world told nine panels at a time.
It’s a pattern. It’s a design. Who does it benefit? Is it something we want? And if so, why? I’m assuming that the book brings up the question because it plans to answer it within the next eight issues. In the mean time, Rorschach continues to be a superlative series. As I knew it would. It all comes back to this, in the end.
It’s a whole lot harder to get a read on The Bat and The Cat #2, obviously because there’s less material to work with, but also because it works on a completely different mode. Where Rorschach works in drawing facts from evidence, this is a study of someone done through memory. It’s about love, loss, and pain. How they affect us, how they linger, how they fuse together events in our recall. And, ultimately, the things we do with that pain. For Batman, that’s pretty well-trod territory. So, instead, we look at it through the eyes of Catwoman. It’s very deliberately hard to follow, and frustrating to put together. But then, that’s Catwoman, right? Playing hard to get is what she does. That’s why it works. That’s what makes it worth chasing.
The key, and it’s good advice that applies to watching any serialized work of art in any medium, is to accept you’re not gonna be able to put together all the answers just yet. You might as well then sit back, and enjoy what’s there purely on a surface level. The spectacle, the particular texture of things, the art of it all. There’s ten more issues of this, relax. Clay Mann, with Tomeu Morey’s colors, is doing career-highlight work in a career that’s been all highlights. It looks great! It flows great! It hits the mood just right! Any more definitive takes will have to wait until the future.
The future, Conan?
Welcome to this, a very special Future State Roundup, featuring our very first second issue, and giving us a nice little thought experiment. If you were to cast your mind back to our very first missive, you would recall all the nice things I’ve said about The Next Batman #1, but especially about its eponymous main feature, the one done with the incomparable talents of Tamra Bonvillain, Nick Derrington, and John Ridley. It would be a real shame if The Next Batman #2 were to take that away from you, wouldn’t it? Can you imagine a continuation of that story without the stylish neon colors giving the action a feel all its own? What if the art got in the way of the flow? What if you were tortured with glimpses of what the good version of that comic could have been, trapped in a take on the material that feels infinitely more boring?
What if I were to tell you, dear reader, that such horrors are not works of science fiction, but instead pure science fact? I have seen this horror, and its name is Laura Braga working off of Nick Derrington’s breakdowns, featuring the colors of Arif Prianto. Real shame too, because this total fucking bummer of a comic is followed by an excellent Batgirls backup from Aneke and Vita Ayala, putting Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Cain in a straight-up Prison Comic, that still feels ambitious enough to throw some fucking Homer around like it’s nothing (a move which I will always love. The final story, a Gotham City Sirens feature by Rob Haynes, Emanuela Lupacchino and Paula Sevenbergen, feels very slight in comparison; I respect the desire to show that you can still have Conner and Palmiotti Girly Hijinx Comics in a future police state dystopia setting, but, it kinda falls flat on its face. Look: I never really cared for that pre-Rebirth Harley Quinn run, and we’ll probably have plenty of time to elaborate on that when the final issue of Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey drops.
For the same price, you could get yourself a copy of Superman: Worlds of War, and get literally more comics than you would know what to do with. It’s got four stories, taking place at around the same time, and being about the same place, even if one of the stories drags its feet for a good long while before getting there. So in that way, it feels more 2000 A.D. than the comic actually taking place in an urban dystopia. There’s more, as Phillip Kennedy Johnson begins his tenure on the Superman books doing the very fantasy writer thing of opening with loads of elaborate but seemingly pointless worldbuilding, and very little of what you actually want.
The worldbuilding, first: it’s Earth, in the near future, and in the wake of Clark Kent’s disappearance, Smallville becomes a bustling holy city, teeming with pilgrims, tourist traps, and plenty of the seemingly lost, reminiscing about their past, and imagining that Superman went down against threats far too elaborately designed for a one-time appearance. Besides the one half-page that’s about these dang suicide bombers in Jerusalem, it resonates, because, well, it’s Superman.
But what you actually want, what the book promises on the cover, is, of course, Mikel Janin doing his best Tom of Finland, and delivering on the sweaty shirtless Superman covered in nothing but dust and chains. There’s way too little of that in the comic, even with the nice Shirtless Daddy variant thrown in there, but Bellaire and Janin still dazzle with colorful blockbuster aplomb, deftly switching between intimate character beats and grandiose widescreen action at the drop of a hat. So, good job all, but it could do with more Bondage Superman PLEASE.
Skipping over the two Kirby riffs because this newsletter is long enough as is, let’s move to the real highlight of the week, the Midnighter backup by Becky Cloonan, Michael W. Conrad and Twitter’s own Gleb Melnikov. It’s 20 pages of pure early 90s gonzo futuristic violence bliss. If you like reading books where a dude just turbo-murders cyborg freaks, done with the energetic style of the Image Comics masters, if you’re a true freak ready to see Jordie Bellaire give its due to all the gory glory that such festivities entail, you’re gonna love it. It’s those Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio books but even better. When you’ve made this, you get to say whatever the fuck you want about Mark Bagley, because you’ve EARNED it.
Is it as surprising to you as it is to me that the Jen Bartel-illustrated story of Wonder Woman at the end of everything is mostly be about Diana going through an incredible emotional rollercoaster? Not that I mind all the crying in Immortal Wonder Woman, because a book this beautiful could be about anything and it’d still be worth poring over. Still, it’s nice that the Nubia backup is there to bring some traditional Wonder Woman action with an African mythology twist. You can welcome more people at the table while still sticking to the traditional framework of American superhero comics, and, as stated earlier, that’s something I’m all for.
A lot of what I’ve said about Teen Titans also applies to Shazam, also written by Tim Sheridan. Even with the focus on a single character, it’s a book with too much going on in the best way. The implied history leading to the book’s status quo is completely bonkers in the best possible way, and the actual history on display takes big swings with the characters, supported by Eduardo Pansica’s clean action and expressive character work, including an inspired take on the Creeper. Maybe it’s not as showy as a Jonathan Hickman megaplot, but there’s a vision there, and that’s the kind of acrobatics I always love in Big Two Comics.
Finally, we get to close out the roundup with Catwoman and Nightwing, two books that aren’t really worth going that deep into. The first one is as excellent as comics by Otto Schmidt and Ram V can get, it couldn’t be anything other than good, and guess what? It’s good. The second one is an outright dud, despite the three pages of Dick Grayson in nothing more than a towel drawn with the expectedly tasteful touch of Nicola Scott.
Wow! Today was A LOT! I did cuts and everything, and this still feels bloated and overly self-indulgent to me! Ah well. Quick update: I got a copy of The Green Lantern Season Two #10! Finally! Wow that sure is a comic where SOMEONE is working out their issues with gender expression, am I right? Still looking for a copy of Guardians of the Galaxy #10, because hope springs eternal! Thanks for reading, and thank you even more for subscribing! Okay enough chit-chat, I know what you want. Won’t keep you any longer, have a nice week and HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS.